© Liliana Porter / San Jose Museum of Art

Written by Meighan Ashford

Photo Edited by Kelly Woodyard

Liliana Porter explores the limits of representation and reality in her surreal compositions in both her art and exhibition in the San Jose Museum of Art, “Actualities/Breaking News”. For over 60 years, Porter’s work has taken part in mixed-media processes. Specific examples include theater, video, and painting. Porter regularly creates theatrical vignettes eliciting existential reflections on the human experience by drawing from an eccentric cast of toys, miniature figures, and another object. While doing so, Porter draws upon influences from Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, Che Guevara, and Jesus Christ. Through the use of this, Porter is able to raise an interesting question regarding how art flows with representation in the world.)

A video and several of the artist's photographs from Liliana Porter: “Actualidades / Breaking News” will examine the news as a platform where politics, spectacle, and ordinary life colide. Through transitional headings like "Arts and Leisure” to "World News," the newspaper's structure to piece together "situations" throughout the artwork. Staged in otherwise unremarkable locations, the disparate vignettes defy the notions of linear time and narrative, through the video, picture, and assemblage pieces taken will raise issues regarding representation and the flow of images in a setting where politics, spectacle, and daily life are constantly colliding.Simultaneously, Porter provides readers with disconnected scenarios speaking of the absurdities and dramas of human existence throughout history and space. Porter defies conventional ideas of linear narrative by piecing together disjointed and ridiculous "situations" using newspaper section headings like "Arts and Leisure" and "World News."

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941, Porter attended the National School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires from 1954-1958 and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City from 1958-1961. After relocating to New York in 1964, she joined forces with fellow artists Luis Kemnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. Together, they formed the New York Graphic Workshop in 1965. Under their direction, they produced prints challenging traditional notions of art production and distribution. Specific examples include, but are not limited to, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museo Caraffa, and Cordoba, Argentina. Moreover, there are public museums throughout the U.S. displaying Porter’s work (ex: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich.) This exhibition, running from Friday, July 28th, 2023 - Monday, February 19th, 2024, offers an in-depth analysis of Porter's broad conceptual practice and showcases her skillful evocation of poignant philosophical and political questions through otherwise simple gestures and miniature objects. By posing these queries in her work, she is shattering the conventional mold of what art is meant to be.